On October 13, the results of the naked mole rat genome study, co-led by Shenzhen UWI and Ewha Woman’s University in Korea, were published online in the leading international journal Nature. The study is the first to interpret the biological properties of naked mole rat at the genome and transcriptome levels, and to identify a number of genes closely related to aging and anti-cancer. The study not only helps scientists clarify the physiological mechanisms that enable naked mole rats to survive in harsh environments such as darkness and low oxygen and maintain a long life and resist cancer, but also promises to be a new model for biology and biomedical research. The naked mole rat is a rodent found in parts of East Africa that lives in underground burrows and has a hairless body. Because they live underground in the dark, their eyes are highly degraded and they rely only on the tentacles on the sides of their bodies to identify their direction. The most attractive feature of the naked mole rat is its long life span of more than 30 years, much longer than its close relatives, rats and mice, which live for only 4-5 years, and its ability to live in underground environments with low oxygen and high nitrogen dioxide concentration. There have been no official reports of cancer in naked mole rats. Scientists hope to unravel their peculiar biology through multi-omics studies. Using next-generation sequencing technology, researchers sequenced a male naked mole rat and predicted that it contained 22,561 genes. Analysis of the study revealed that the ancestors of the naked mole rat and rats and mice diverged about 73 million years ago, and that 93 percent of their genomes remain similar to those of humans. Using a comparative transcriptome approach, the researchers studied the differences in transcript expression between naked mole rats of different ages and exposed to different oxygen concentrations, and identified a number of genes that may be related to aging and hypoxic adaptation: stable expression of aging regulatory genes such as TERT may be associated with longevity in naked mole rats; the unique regulatory mechanism of p16Ink4a and p19Arf may be important for anti-cancer in naked mole rats The unique regulatory mechanism of p16Ink4a and p19Arf may be an important factor in the anti-cancer of naked mole rats; the specific mutations of HIF1a and VHL may be one of the reasons for the low oxygen tolerance of naked mole rats. The researchers will further investigate the molecular mechanisms of anti-aging and anti-cancer in naked mole rats, and provide new animal models for exploring human anti-aging and anti-cancer biomedical research, according to Fang Xiaodong, head of the project at UW-GI.